Spent 6 hours tracking a bad ground on a G1000 install in Tulsa last month

I was pulling my hair out over a random GPWS fault on a King Air at Riverside hangar. Turns out it was a single ground screw on the P1001 connector that wasn't torqued right. The schematics showed it fine but the pin wasn't making contact. Has anyone else burned a whole day on something this small?

3 comments

3 Comments

clairer7917d agoOG Member

Man, I feel your pain on that one. I had a similar issue on a Cessna 441 where the stall warning kept going off in flight. We checked everything - the vanes, the wiring, the computer - wasted a whole Saturday. Turned out it was just a tiny nick in the wire insulation at the cannon plug where it was chafing against the bracket. A little piece of electrical tape and some heat shrink fixed it. Now I start with a visual inspection of every pin and connector before I even pull out the multimeter, saves me hours of headscratching.

beth87817d ago

I actually read an article about this exact thing from one of the old Beechcraft maintenance guys. He swore that like 70% of weird electrical gremlins on those 80s turboprops are just chafed wires at connector points. Something about the vibration over time and how those cannon plugs can work loose just enough to rub. It's wild how something that small can drive you crazy for hours. Definitely gonna start checking my connectors first from now on.

kevin_martin13d ago

Ngl that thing about chafed wires at cannon plugs hits home. Had a buddy spend damn near two days on a Piper Cheyenne with a flickering annunciator panel. Turned out one of the pins at the J4 connector was bent just enough to lose contact when the plane got hot.